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01:00These men are different, set apart from other human beings.
01:06They have sworn to accept their deaths unconditionally, whenever orders or circumstances demand it.
01:12And they have taken that oath, given that promise, in the name of the rest of us.
01:17They have offered to spare us the horror of confronting the face of battle.
01:30War can show a face of glory to the world.
01:48No spectacle so touches the emotions as the sight of soldiers arrayed for ceremony.
01:53A column of young men in fine uniform turns heads and stirs hearts.
01:57Whether they parade to bury a hero, celebrate a victory,
02:00or, as on this day, state their readiness to die in the terrible environment of a battlefield.
02:27Fire!
02:43Fire!
03:12Just south of Brussels is the battlefield of Waterloo.
03:15It's an appropriate place from which to observe the changing face of battle.
03:19For here, battlefields, ancient and modern, overlap each other like scales of armour.
03:24Fifty miles northwest lies the sea.
03:27Fifty miles southeast are the steep, wooded hills of the Ardennes.
03:31Waterloo stands astride the corridor in between, a natural invasion route for armies of all ages.
03:36At its centre rises the Lion Mound, Belgium's monument to the Allied victory,
03:41and a unique place to look back at the experience of battle.
03:45Some miles to the south of me, over there, more than 2,000 years ago,
03:50Caesar and his Roman legions fought the Nervii on the banks of the Sambre.
03:54Further to the west were the battlefields of Agincourt and Crecy,
03:58where English archers cut down the flower of French chivalry in the 14th and 15th centuries.
04:04And not far to the east lies Remelies,
04:07where Marlborough and his cavalry won a famous victory 100 years before Waterloo.
04:11And 100 years after Waterloo, it was the German army of Von Kluck
04:15that passed this way, bound for the mud and trenches of Flanders.
04:19In the early days of May 1940, from here you could very well have heard
04:23the rumble of the tanks of the 3rd Panzer Division,
04:26the northern flank of the German advance,
04:28that introduced to a startled world the revolutionary concept of Blitzkrieg,
04:32the lightning of war.
04:34So this lion mound is a military vantage point in more than one way.
04:38In this program, we can view the actions that took place at different stages
04:42throughout the course of that eventful day,
04:44and compare them directly with the equivalent experience
04:46of other battles in other centuries.
04:49For war does change, even if the human emotions it touches
04:52remain constant and universal.
04:56June the 18th, 1815.
04:59Napoleon, on the morning of Waterloo, reviewed his army from the ridge
05:03which runs opposite the lion mound.
05:07While Napoleon showed himself to his soldiers,
05:10Wellington's men were marching to the ridge on the other side of the valley.
05:18Men become soldiers for all sorts of reasons.
05:22Roman soldiers served mainly for pay.
05:25Every soldier comes from the name of the coin they received.
05:29The Muslim soldiers of the Caliphs of Islam
05:31were enlisted as slaves of the state.
05:35At the start of America's Civil War, the North relied on volunteers.
05:42Tommies of the British Empire soldiered for a shilling a day.
05:47Kitchener's armies went to the First World War for patriotism and comradeship.
05:52The French went because they owed that duty to the Republic.
05:59The Germans marched to the Second World War
06:02in obedience to the will of the Führer.
06:05For the average American conscript who fought the Germans and the Japanese,
06:09the aim was to get the job done and get back home.
06:13And the British regulars who went to the Falklands were also doing their job
06:17as highly trained professionals.
06:52MUSIC
06:59Dawn at Waterloo, and soldiers on both sides
07:02waited with mixed feelings for the impending battle.
07:05One 16-year-old British infantry officer, George Keppel,
07:09spent what he called the dreary interval between daylight and the first cannon shot,
07:14constantly wishing that the fight was fought.
07:21The urge to have it over and done with seems to afflict all soldiers on the eve of battle.
07:26Fear gnaws at them, fear of death, of wounds,
07:30of showing fear to their comrades.
07:33Men draw close, compulsively cleaning their weapons
07:36and trying to keep at bay that silence that falls on each little group.
07:42You get that waiting, that fear,
07:47not fear in itself, but fear of being frightened.
07:51You are waiting for something to happen, you don't know what's going to happen.
07:57In yourself you're waiting, you think, am I going to be frightened?
08:02It goes through your mind, I don't want to be frightened,
08:06because if anything goes wrong and I'm scared, I might let my mates down.
08:12I was particularly nervy.
08:16I'd clean me gun, go off to the toilet,
08:21have a meal, have a pick out of the bully beef tin that I didn't really want.
08:26But once I was committed, I was a totally different fellow.
08:30I could carry on then. Once I got moving, I was good.
08:33But the night before, no good at all.
08:37I went from acute fear the day I got off the plane and landed there
08:41to chronic fear that stayed with me the entire time I was there.
08:45Acute fear is when you feel like someone's going to take your life right away
08:50and you're absolutely like this, ready to respond,
08:54and chronic fear becomes kind of a knot in the pit of your stomach.
08:58It's there all the time, and never quite ever goes away.
09:03In common language, you get butterflies, you know.
09:06You've been drinking all the time.
09:08Even with the parachute on your back, you don't know what will happen.
09:12Will it open? Will you arrive safely down?
09:16But as soon as the plane left the ground, it was calm then, yeah?
09:20But the men never calmed down, because they didn't know.
09:24Once the doors open and the green light comes on,
09:29once the order came, stand up,
09:33well, I mean, it was a feeling like either you fill your pants or you jump out.
09:48But part of that fear is the physical fear of being hit, actually down,
09:54and part of it is failing.
09:57And the two sort of balance against each other and help you go on.
10:01So prior to it, you're aware of it.
10:04I mean, we stood together prior to moving around to the battle in a group,
10:10and we all stood close and sort of mumbled together and sort of got confidence.
10:15And that was fear, but there was also anticipation.
10:19You know, it's the one thing we'd all trained for.
10:22No one would have not wanted to be there, but nobody really wanted to be there,
10:26so it was very mixed feelings.
10:41It was like going to a picnic.
10:44Everyone was happy.
10:47It was really amazing that it wasn't like going into a battle at the time
10:52until the first shots were fired across the bow of our ships.
10:57Then the picnic was no longer there.
11:00Then came the war.
11:10The main action at Waterloo opened with an artillery bombardment
11:13when Napoleon's grand battery of 80 guns fired for over half an hour
11:17across the valley separating the two armies,
11:20and the British artillery replied.
11:22Probably more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition were fired in that interval
11:26by guns like this one.
11:28This happens to be British.
11:30It's a bronze six-pounder, meaning that its solid shot weighed six pounds,
11:34but it also fired a loose shot, canister or grape like this,
11:38which was designed to have the same effect upon massed infantry
11:42as a shotgun cartridge on a flock of birds.
11:47To aim, the number one would simply squint down the barrel.
11:51If he wanted to raise or lower, elevate or depress, he could use this,
11:55but if he wanted to traverse, he simply used raw muscle.
11:58He picked up the hand spike and he pushed and shoved until he was happy.
12:02Now, the range of this light six-pounder would have been up to 1,200 yards
12:05and the French heavier 12-pounders across the valley up to a mile.
12:09At long range, that's what it was,
12:13they'd have been using this solid shot and using it with horrific effect.
12:18During the central stage of the battle,
12:20the Inner Skilling Regiment was kept under direct fire by the French artillery
12:24at a range of 700 yards for four hours.
12:27When it marched off, it left 450 of its 750 officers and men
12:32dead or wounded in the positions.
12:35Ensign Leek of the 52nd Regiment actually saw the ball
12:39leave the muzzle of a French gun after its crew had swabbed, loaded and rammed,
12:43and he watched it come apparently straight at his face.
12:46He debated whether he should duck and decided that honour forbade that,
12:50so he drew himself to attention
12:52while the ball took off the heads of the four men next to him.
12:59No wonder the infantry feared and hated artillery.
13:03It was already the great killer of the battlefield.
13:07As one war followed another, during the century after Waterloo,
13:11artillery grew in power and impact.
13:14During the American Civil War,
13:16it was the terrible guns the survivors of battle recalled.
13:19I was never so tired of shelling in my life, wrote one veteran.
13:23I hate cannon.
13:26And now artillery began to destroy townscapes as well.
13:30In the battle with the rebellious Paris Communards of 1871,
13:34government guns tore down street after street,
13:37transforming the centre of the French capital into a field of ruins,
13:41leaving us with images we might well associate
13:44with the devastation of the bombing of World War II.
13:48But it was during the First World War that artillery revealed its newfound power.
13:56A century of invention had turned Wellington's smoothbore cannon
14:01into engines of mass destruction of every size.
14:10From the small field guns, like the British 18-pounder
14:14and its French equivalent, the 75mm, which fired 20 rounds a minute,
14:19to the massive railway guns that could reach miles into the enemy's positions.
14:25Guns like these made the First World War truly an artillery war.
14:32The great trench offensives were preceded by bombardments
14:35of unparalleled weight and intensity.
14:39Before the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917,
14:42four and a quarter million shells were fired over 19 days.
14:47Even delivering such bombardments was an experience no gunners could ever forget.
14:53I don't think I have ever known anything as impressive
14:57as the opening of a really full-scale barrage.
15:01Suddenly, bang on zero hour, the whole place just comes alive
15:06with a terrific surge of all the shells that are travelling through the air
15:10and away on the skyline.
15:12As far as the eye can see, right and left is absolutely lit up with pinpoints.
15:17A most impressive sight.
15:19Yet the gun crews rarely saw what their shells hit.
15:22It was the forward observers who witnessed the fall of shot.
15:25I remember when we were firing our 8-inch howitzers from Albert
15:30and there was a village called Earl's which was more or less intact
15:34behind the German lines.
15:36It distressed me enormously because it was a very pretty little village
15:40with houses on both sides of the road
15:43and I only had to fire four rounds, one, two, three, four,
15:49to see the power of the church collapse
15:52and the whole of the village flattened out.
15:55Four rounds only from our 8-inch howitzers.
16:00It was artillery that was the great killer of the First World War.
16:04It was also the great demoraliser.
16:06Soldiers of all nations loathed shellfire's arbitrary and impersonal character.
16:11A young British officer wrote,
16:13Terror and death coming from far away seemed much more ghastly
16:17than a hail of fire from people we could see
16:20and with whom we could come to grips.
16:22It was a fatalistic situation.
16:25Imagine the terrible weather,
16:27the ground outside turns to an impossible morass
16:31and the din, the noise and the concussion
16:34just making the air vibrate.
16:37You really felt, well, there's nothing we can do to escape.
16:40It's a question of time before your number's on the bit that comes along.
16:46Artillery did not only destroy men.
16:49It also devastated the surface of the battlefield
16:51on which they moved and tried to survive.
16:54It turned farms and villages to heaps of shapeless rubble,
16:57fields to wasteland, forests to tangled heaps of brushwood.
17:02Above all, it turned the soil into mud,
17:05mud so deep and liquid that it swallowed horses and drowned men.
17:12This gentle slope is the rise that leads to Passchendaele,
17:15the tiny village outside Ypres,
17:17so long and savagely contested
17:19that its name has come to stand for the Holocaust of the First World War.
17:23This is how it looks today and as it must have looked in 1914.
17:27But in the autumn of 1917,
17:29it had come to resemble the surface of the moon.
17:32This sequence of aerial photographs record how,
17:35as crater came to overlap crater during the relentless bombardment,
17:39houses, hedges, even field boundaries were progressively erased
17:43until Passchendaele existed only as a name on a map,
17:46a terrible tribute to the power that artillery exerts on the modern battlefield.
17:59At one o'clock in the afternoon,
18:01the Battle of Waterloo had been raging for two hours.
18:04It was at its fiercest here around Hougoumont,
18:07the old fortified manor house and farm
18:09standing just in front of the British right wing.
18:12Wellington had occupied it and loopholed it for defence.
18:15It's still an impressive building today.
18:18In 1815, it was even stronger and more extensive,
18:21extensive enough to contain nearly two battalions of British foot guards.
18:27Wellington had garrisoned it strongly
18:29because he thought its possession essential to secure his right wing.
18:32The French were equally keen to take it from him.
18:35Indeed, they opened the battle by an attack on Hougoumont
18:38and the fight there quickly became a battle within a battle,
18:41persisting throughout the morning and afternoon.
18:44At one stage, the French actually broke into the central courtyard,
18:47but by sheer weight of numbers,
18:49the British were able to force the gate shut behind them.
18:52The intruders were then hunted down
18:54and every single one of them killed except a young drummer boy.
19:00Around the middle of the day,
19:02some of the buildings here were set on fire by shells from French howitzers,
19:06and this introduced another dimension of horror to the fighting in the farm.
19:10The roofs of the barn and the manor crashed in a sheet of flame
19:13on top of the wounded who were lying inside,
19:15and many of them were burnt to death.
19:17The whole of this courtyard was like an oven.
19:19Everyone was scorched by flying embers.
19:22The old manor house, which used to stand over there,
19:24burnt down in the end,
19:26and all that's left is this little chapel.
19:29But in spite of all this,
19:31and despite the ferocity and courage of the French attack,
19:33the walls of this courtyard were never breached.
19:35The wood outside was lost,
19:37the buildings often completely surrounded,
19:39but at the end of the battle, the foot guards were standing firm.
19:42Throughout history, it has always been a hard and bloody task
19:46to capture a fortified position from resolute defenders.
19:50To capture Malta in 1565,
19:52the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman,
19:54sent a mighty armada of 181 ships
19:57and an army of 30,000 men.
20:02The island was defended by 700 knights of St. John
20:05and 9,000 hired soldiers.
20:08Yet four months later, the Turks,
20:10who had lost two-thirds of their men in the siege,
20:12retired in ignominious defeat to Constantinople.
20:19400 years later, American marines were brought in
20:22to recapture the city of Hue,
20:24Vietnam's ancient capital,
20:26seized by the North Vietnamese army in their Tet Offensive.
20:39In the heart of the city lies its citadel,
20:42built by French colonial engineers in the 19th century
20:45and designed only to withstand gunpowder and round shot.
20:49Against it, the Americans deployed all the firepower
20:52of a mighty modern army.
21:09Despite these ferocious assaults,
21:11the defenders held out for 25 days
21:13behind the citadel's walls and moat,
21:16until in the end it was carried by the oldest of methods,
21:19direct assault by infantrymen.
21:22Well, I'd been over here four months
21:24and we were always in the rice paddies,
21:26in the jungles, patrols, something like that.
21:28This was something new.
21:31It's, like, broke into, like, any city,
21:34It's, like, broke into, like, any city,
21:36blocks, concrete buildings.
21:40And the thing was, you'd never know what was going to happen
21:43every time you turned a corner
21:45or every time you entered a building.
21:47We got in the habit of throwing grenades
21:49and firing first before we went anywhere,
21:51and in some instances it was no more than five feet
21:54that you had to shoot, shoot down
21:56or he was trying to shoot you.
22:00This went on building by building, we had to take it.
22:02There was no such thing as trying to clear a block out,
22:05you know, just with a platoon.
22:07We broke down into five-man teams.
22:10It was just chaos, you know.
22:12Just whoever shot fastest made it,
22:14in which quite a few did make it on our side, you know.
22:21Our job was to take the city.
22:23I can remember a huge wall around it.
22:27Most of the city was taken at the time,
22:29but the citadel was left.
22:32It was a huge wall.
22:46I would say half of the company had serious enough wounds.
22:52The final count of men that were killed in my platoon
22:55were five out of my platoon alone.
22:58I think out of our company, I believe there was 15.
23:03The citadel finally fell,
23:05but the defenders had already slipped away.
23:11By early afternoon at Waterloo,
23:13it was now the turn of the massed ranks of infantry
23:15to go into action.
23:18Wellington's men awaited their attack
23:20lying down in the dead ground behind the crest of the ridge
23:23or crouching behind hedge banks, muskets at the ready,
23:26until the French columns came within range.
23:30Most of the infantry carried muskets like this.
23:33Now, this is a brown Bess.
23:35A soldier had to stand up to put powder and ball down the barrel
23:38and then ram them home with this.
23:44So he usually fired standing,
23:46and a well-trained soldier could fire two shots a minute.
23:49But it was not an accurate weapon.
23:51If its heavy lead ball hit home, it was deadly.
23:54You'd be lucky to hit a man over 70 yards away.
23:57So it was really only useful against large targets.
24:03The French infantry who made the first attack
24:06presented just such a target.
24:08They advanced across the valley in massed battalion columns,
24:1125 men deep and 200 wide.
24:15They halted 40 yards down this slope
24:18and began to deploy into line.
24:20At this point, the British infantry, four Scottish regiments,
24:23discharged their muskets,
24:25taking the French by surprise.
24:27They then fixed bayonets
24:31and burst through the hedge.
24:36Here on the ridge, 8,000 or 9,000 English and French
24:39fought a violent hand-to-hand battle.
24:41The French, impeded by the press of their own numbers,
24:44soon broke and fled,
24:46and were chased back across the valley by the Scots Dragoons
24:49to the cry of Scotland forever.
24:54The experience of battle for the infantrymen
24:57had altered very little in the centuries before Waterloo.
25:00For the Persians, who fought the Lydians at Sardis in 546 BC,
25:04combat took a form which would have been familiar
25:07to Julius Caesar or Frederick the Great of Prussia.
25:10Once the two sides made contact,
25:12it was a business of push and shove with edged weapons.
25:15The fight was always short
25:17because the muscular effort required
25:19was too exhausting to be sustained for long.
25:22Gunpowder scarcely varied
25:24the essential nature of a foot soldier's experience.
25:27He now had to endure cannon and musket shot
25:30instead of the arrow cloud.
25:32But since black powder weapons were so inaccurate,
25:35he still had to close with the enemy to deliver a decision.
25:39So after the opening exchange of projectiles,
25:42it was hand-to-hand combat that decided
25:45who gave way and who won the battle.
25:49What did change the infantrymen's experience of battle
25:53and change it catastrophically
25:55was the appearance of quick-firing artillery,
25:59the range and accuracy of the rifle,
26:02and the inescapable blanket fire of the machine gun.
26:11The battle was a battle of the heart.
26:14There was a blanket fire of the machine gun.
26:19Disastrously, no army had appreciated
26:21by the outbreak of the Great War
26:23their impact on mass infantry formations.
26:26The British soldiers who left their trenches
26:29on the first day of the Somme
26:31walked into a scythe of machine gun fire.
26:33A survivor remembered,
26:35By the time I'd gone 10 yards,
26:37there seemed to be only a few men left around me.
26:40By the time I'd gone 20 yards,
26:42I was hit myself.
26:44Everybody had wondered,
26:47who was going to get killed?
26:49How many of us will come back?
26:52I'd rather get killed than get badly wounded
26:55and lie out there and die.
26:58And the thousand and one things,
27:02trying to picture how your mother and dad would take it
27:05when the telegram arrives to say
27:08the Secretary of State regrets to inform you,
27:13so and so and so and so.
27:16They came over, not in extended order like we advance,
27:22but they came over en masse,
27:25just like a crowd coming out of a football match.
27:28And it wasn't a matter of aiming,
27:31it was just a matter of loading and pulling the trigger.
27:3660,000 soldiers were hit on that July morning.
27:3920,000 died.
27:41The disaster the infantrymen suffered on the Somme
27:44introduced a new experience for men on the battlefield.
27:47When not attacking, they found shelter below ground.
27:50When they did attack, they did so in a single file
27:53to present as small a target as possible.
27:58In the years since 1918,
28:00the infantryman has had to fight to survive
28:02on every sort of battlefield.
28:04He has sweated through the jungles and rainforests of Southeast Asia.
28:10He's stormed through the deserts of North Africa.
28:17He's suffered on the exposed beaches of the Pacific Islands.
28:22He's endured the unforgiving snows of the Russian steppe.
28:27He's struggled in the mountains of Italy and the Balkans.
28:33He's battled through the hedgerows of Northern Europe.
28:36But despite today's technology,
28:38he still remains essentially a foot soldier.
28:41All of a sudden, you're the most important man.
28:44You're as good as any fighter pilot or all the other guys.
28:47You're at the front, and everyone's doing what you want to do.
28:50And that's a good feeling,
28:52apart from the fact that you're doing what you want to do.
28:55Apart from the fact that you are at the front,
28:57unlike everybody else, what you're going to fight with is you
29:00and a gun, which they give you,
29:03and everything else you carry on your back.
29:06And you're always cold, you're always wet,
29:09you're always frightened,
29:11and you're always completely shattered all the time.
29:15You're never comfortable.
29:18And then you have to beat all of those things
29:21to do the thing that they want you to do,
29:23which is to go in and smack the enemy down hard
29:27and finish the job.
29:29You can bombard it, you can fire at it from aircraft,
29:33you can do everything to the target,
29:35but the only time you win is to have us lot,
29:38the grunts of the world, standing there
29:40saying this is now our piece of real estate.
29:43All the technology's great,
29:45but there's nothing that can really help us
29:47do that last final 400 meters to finish the job.
29:54By the afternoon of Waterloo,
29:57Wellington knew that he had a full-scale battle on his hands
30:01and that his outcome rested on his powers of command.
30:07In one important sense, Waterloo resembled every other battle
30:11from the earliest times to the end of the 19th century.
30:14The commander could see the whole battlefield,
30:16or most of it anyway, from one spot,
30:18and he could deliver his orders to his subordinates without delay.
30:22But in fact, Wellington was rarely in one spot for long.
30:25He was constantly in motion,
30:27riding always to where danger threatened worst,
30:29sometimes even sitting out the charges
30:31in the middle of one of his infantry squares.
30:33He could ride from the centre of the line
30:35to the right flank in about ten minutes,
30:37and despite the massive amount of smoke that covered the battlefield,
30:40he was able to keep much of it directly in view.
30:43If he saw something that needed attention,
30:45but he could not go himself,
30:47he would hastily write his orders on slips of parchment like this
30:50and dispatch them by messenger.
30:54Today, orders flow from the point of command
30:57by means undreamt of in Wellington's century,
31:00and the information on which orders are based
31:02flows into the point of command
31:04in a profusion with which no single human being can deal.
31:07A modern military headquarters can cover a continent,
31:10and its field of action is the world.
31:13Here at North American Air Defence Headquarters,
31:15they keep watch for signs of missile attack on the United States.
31:20They receive their intelligence from radar,
31:22reconnaissance satellite, and seabed sound surveillance.
31:26This unending stream of facts is processed by the banks of computers
31:30and the results displayed on screens.
31:34It's on these electronic messages
31:36that today's commanders must base their decisions.
31:46By mid-afternoon at Waterloo,
31:48the French had tried both artillery and infantry against the Allied line.
31:52It still refused to break.
31:54So at about four o'clock, Marshal Ney,
31:56Napoleon's battlefield commander,
31:58decided to commit his cavalry.
32:00Soon, an immense mass of horsemen
32:02could be seen approaching from beyond La Belle Alliance,
32:05that white building in the distance behind me.
32:08The dense columns of cavalry,
32:1012 ranks deep, 500 men abreast,
32:12advanced up this slope,
32:14watched in awestruck silence by the British they were about to assault.
32:18It was a spectacle scarcely ever to be seen again.
32:21A sea of steel and horse flesh and brilliant uniforms
32:25flowing in waves across the folds of the valley.
32:30But the most unexpected thing about the attack
32:32was that it was cavalry alone.
32:34There were no French foot soldiers to be seen.
32:36Yet against cavalry, infantry had an almost impregnable defence
32:40to form squares.
32:42As long as the British infantry kept steady,
32:44properly formed and cool enough to continue firing,
32:46they were unbreakable.
32:52So as the French cavalry came over the ridge at a canter,
32:55they were cut down by grapeshot from the British artillery batteries
32:58and musket fire from the squares.
33:01Time and again they attacked,
33:03charging up the slope, round and past the squares,
33:06then retreating down the hill,
33:08where they reformed to charge again.
33:10Soon the ridge around the British line was so covered
33:12with the dead and wounded men and horses
33:14that the cavalry could no longer ride over it.
33:17Twelve times the French charged.
33:19But when, after an hour and a half, they finally withdrew,
33:22the British squares still stood unbroken.
33:26Fire!
33:36Ceremony is the only duty that remains
33:39to the surviving mounted regiments.
33:41The role they once played strikes the onlooker as utterly archaic.
33:45But in their great days, it was crucial.
33:47The mounted scout found the enemy.
33:50The skirmisher kept him in play
33:52while the general assembled his forces.
33:54And at the crisis of battle, the shock regiments destroyed him.
33:57Find, fix, destroy.
34:00These functions were and remain essential.
34:03Today, they are performed by the tank.
34:09The tank was an invention made necessary
34:11by the stalemate of the First World War,
34:13but one so primitive that it achieved little.
34:19By 1940, however, tanks were transformed,
34:22and with them came a new form of war, Blitzkrieg.
34:33Its impact was shattering, demoralizing those it did not destroy.
34:39We came through Holland, Berlin, and France.
34:42But as soon as we crossed the Belgian border near Arras,
34:46the roads, absolutely day and night,
34:49had been chock-a-block with people running away,
34:52leaving everything behind, leaving their homes.
34:56And as soon as our convoys came,
34:59everybody shot because the people were frightened.
35:03It was not only the civilian victims of Blitzkrieg
35:06who found the appearance of tanks terrifying.
35:08All of a sudden, we realized they were enemy tanks.
35:11I said, my God, this is it.
35:15What can you do against a tank?
35:17They have machine guns.
35:18They can run over you.
35:19That's the thing you think about more than anything else,
35:22is a tank running over your body.
35:24There was no place to go.
35:25Absolutely no place.
35:27I felt like an ant on top of a billiard table.
35:32On the billiard table of the Sinai Desert,
35:35Israeli tank soldiers have twice waded into Blitzkrieg,
35:38experiencing something of the exhilaration
35:40felt by European tank crews in World War II.
35:44Racing across the Sinai in 1967,
35:47I was 22 years old,
35:49and in four days we got from Gaza Strip
35:51to the Suez Canal banks,
35:53fighting, moving, all the time on the move.
35:57It was a feeling of great power
36:00and great energy being released in four days.
36:09Power and energy in 20th century warfare
36:11are most completely embodied in the aircraft.
36:14It takes many military forms.
36:16As a strategic bomber,
36:17it has been used to wage war on its own
36:19against the cities and factories of the enemy.
36:22The soldier on the battlefield
36:23knows it better as a weapon of ground attack
36:25and of tactical bombardment against fortified places.
36:35The controversial bombing of Monte Cassino,
36:37the Italian fortress monastery,
36:39demonstrates the aircraft's awesome destructive power
36:42and the terrible effect it has
36:43on soldiers trapped in a bombardment.
36:46One morning, you saw silver fishes there,
36:50airplanes shining in the air.
36:53But then all of a sudden somebody shouted,
36:55got a bloody bomb door open.
36:57You could see the doors here open, yeah?
37:00Be real, I said.
37:01Well, they have doors.
37:10It was hell.
37:12Actually, you'd think that that's the last moment
37:15we're still alive.
37:17It was terrible.
37:18We had bombs explode
37:19only about five, six yards away from mine.
37:22The blast lifted you actually off the ground
37:25and dropped down again.
37:27It was terrible.
37:28We had bombs explode
37:29only about five, six yards away from mine.
37:32The blast lifted you actually off the ground
37:35and dropped down again.
37:37You hate the shops up there.
37:38Doesn't matter what nationality it is.
37:40If it was our own planes,
37:42we would have called them bloody bastards.
37:45In plain English, you know,
37:47I shouldn't say that now,
37:48but you hated them.
37:51At that moment, you can't hit back.
37:54You just crept in the hole like a frightened rat.
38:01The whole hill, it was just like open.
38:05The whole hill, it was just like open.
38:08It stunk.
38:09It smelled.
38:10You smelled gunpowder.
38:12Screaming soldiers, you know,
38:14brought the wounded or wounded.
38:16But you didn't dare.
38:17When you had the nice cover,
38:19you didn't dare to creep out to save your comrade
38:22because that means your own life again.
38:26Many, many men, they'd been left behind,
38:29but I was lucky I got out.
38:35Since the Second World War,
38:36another enemy of the foot soldier
38:38has taken to the skies,
38:39the attack helicopter.
38:41Many military helicopters perform worker day roles,
38:44reconnaissance or transportation.
38:49In Vietnam, the gunship helicopter proved
38:51that it could be used as a weapon
38:53of pinpoint attack on the battlefield
38:55with devastating effect.
38:58A lot of people think that
38:59because helicopters are up in the air
39:01that you don't get a real firsthand view
39:03of what you're doing and who you're killing.
39:05That's not true,
39:06especially when you're flying low level,
39:08when you're flying at treetop level
39:10and you've got an M60 stuck out the side
39:12of the helicopter and somebody fires on you
39:14you're no more than 10 feet from.
39:15You see his head splatter
39:17or whatever you may have hit.
39:19You see it pretty well firsthand.
39:20You get an idea of the gruesomeness
39:22of what killing is.
39:23And again, it never bothered me
39:25because I knew I was doing
39:26what I was supposed to be doing.
39:28And if you let it bother you,
39:29you'd have big head problems.
39:33The thrill of flying the helicopter
39:35and getting it to do
39:36what it was capable of doing
39:38and winning,
39:40obviously you were taking fire,
39:42you were getting hits,
39:43you may have taken a couple of hits
39:44in the aircraft,
39:45but at the end you were the one that won.
39:47Absolutely.
39:48It was very exhilarating.
40:00At about 7 o'clock in the evening
40:02of June the 18th, 1815,
40:04the Battle of Waterloo approached
40:06what has been called its crisis.
40:08Napoleon had exhausted all normal means
40:10to break the British line.
40:12All had failed.
40:13He therefore decided to launch
40:15the only reserve force he had left,
40:17never before committed to action in battle,
40:19the Imperial Guard.
40:33Powell, an officer of the 1st Foot Guards,
40:36describes the result.
40:38The French, he said,
40:40came on at the double,
40:41shouting,
40:42Vive l'Empereur!
40:43They continued to advance
40:44until within 50 or 60 paces of our front,
40:47when the brigade was ordered to stand up.
40:49Whether it was from this sudden
40:51and unexpected appearance so near them,
40:53which must have seemed
40:54as starting out of the ground,
40:56or the tremendously heavy fire
40:57we threw into them,
41:00La Garde, who had never before failed,
41:02suddenly stopped.
41:04Those from a distance
41:05and more on the flank
41:06who could see the affair,
41:07tell us that the effect of our fire
41:09seemed to force the head of the column
41:11bodily back.
41:13The Imperial Guard retreated,
41:15and with it,
41:16the rest of the French army.
41:20With the fighting over,
41:21it was time to count the cost.
41:23About 40,000 of the 120,000 present
41:26had been killed.
41:2850,000 had been killed or wounded,
41:30and 10,000 horses.
41:32The wounded would be pitied
41:33more than the dead.
41:35As darkness fell,
41:36the battlefield was filled
41:37with shrieks and groans
41:38of those too hurt to move.
41:52Many thousands would lie out
41:53on the battlefield
41:54throughout the night of Waterloo,
41:56some throughout the following day.
41:59A few lay uncollected and untended
42:01for two days and three nights,
42:03and still lived.
42:04But the majority of those left so long
42:06died of shock,
42:07loss of blood,
42:08or dehydration.
42:10All the wounded men
42:11were tormented by thirst,
42:13as well as the pain of their injuries.
42:26In their agony,
42:27they faced yet another threat,
42:28death at the hands of looters,
42:30military as well as civilian,
42:32who crept among the stricken
42:33during the hours of darkness
42:34to strip them of their valuables
42:36and to kill those who resisted.
42:43Even if the wounded survived
42:44abandonment on the battlefield
42:46and the ordeal of evacuation from it,
42:48they still had to undergo
42:49the torture of primitive surgery
42:51at the hands of their medical officers,
42:53surgery without anesthetics
42:55or antiseptics.
42:57In some regiments,
42:58as many soldiers died in hospital
43:00as had been killed on the field.
43:08No wonder,
43:09as Wellington rode back in the moonlight
43:11through the devastation of the battlefield,
43:13those who saw him glimpsed
43:14no hint of a victor's jubilation
43:16in his face.
43:18A victory,
43:19he said afterwards,
43:21is the greatest tragedy in the world,
43:23except a defeat.
43:34The wounded soldier of the 20th century
43:36has all the advantages of improving medicine,
43:39but as if by some process
43:41of satanic compensation,
43:43the wounds he risks
43:44may be far more ghastly
43:46than those commonly inflicted
43:47by sword or musket.
43:53Wounds and death
43:55still remain the price soldiers pay
43:57for taking part in battle.
43:59I think everyone's afraid of dying.
44:02Naturally,
44:03whenever you're going to face
44:04going off to war,
44:06you're going to be fearful of that.
44:08I don't think I really dealt
44:10so much with that fear of dying
44:12as I had troubles
44:14in dealing with
44:16first, being wounded.
44:18Okay, I was afraid of being wounded
44:20and even made an off-the-cuff comment
44:22a few times that
44:24if I lost so much as a fingernail,
44:26I didn't want to come home.
44:28Well,
44:29I lost just a little more than a fingernail
44:31and I'm here and I've accepted it.
44:33But I think the thing that I feared
44:35more than death
44:36than being wounded in Vietnam
44:38was being captured
44:40and taken as a prisoner.
44:41Capture is fraught with uncertainty.
44:43These men suffered that ordeal
44:45at the hands of the Japanese.
44:47The joy of their liberation
44:48cannot mask their years of mistreatment.
44:51It was an incredible parade
44:54because every man there
44:56wanted to show that he was
44:58still a soldier.
45:00Some were bent over on sticks.
45:02Some were like elephants
45:04with beriberi.
45:06We all had dysentery.
45:08Our feet were two inches thick
45:10like bear feet
45:12from yak feet
45:13from tinier
45:14and from ulcers.
45:16The troops had assembled
45:18on Singapore
45:20on the other side of the road
45:21to welcome us back.
45:23Didn't say a word.
45:24It was like looking at another world.
45:27They were booted.
45:28They were fleshed.
45:30They were probably very thin
45:31but they looked enormous.
45:33And we even had a whiff
45:36of death about us.
45:38And the sergeant major
45:39pushed us around.
45:40Our sergeant major
45:42lined us up
45:43until the bear feet
45:45still separating
45:47were in a perfect line.
45:49And then he went to Johnson
45:50who was our major
45:52and reported that the company
45:54was correct.
45:55And he went over
45:56to Blackjack Galligan
45:57and said,
45:58All present correct, sir.
46:00And Galligan said,
46:01But where are the rest?
46:04He said,
46:05They're all here.
46:08That's what it was.
46:10We were the last.
46:14We lost 310
46:16and 500 in Darlington.
46:47By nightfall of the 18th of June, 1815,
46:51the Battle of Waterloo was over.
46:53Perhaps the hardest fought
46:54and probably the most decisive,
46:56certainly the most dramatic
46:57of all battles
46:58of black powder warfare.
47:00What does the battle tell us
47:02about the role
47:03of the common soldier?
47:04Infantryman, gunner, cavalryman?
47:07Well, first,
47:08that the experience he undergoes
47:10has no counterpart
47:11anywhere else in human activity.
47:13The strains it imposes,
47:14the responses it demands,
47:16fall outside
47:17the common and the everyday.
47:19Second,
47:20that it can nevertheless
47:21be survived
47:22and that chances of survival
47:24are improved
47:25by training, skill, discipline
47:27and personal courage.
47:29But that thirdly,
47:30the battlefield
47:31is an arena of accident and chance
47:33and no soldier,
47:34however brave or disciplined,
47:36however skilled
47:37in the handling of his weapons,
47:39can guarantee to himself
47:40his own survival.
47:42Those who do survive
47:44are set apart
47:45from the rest of us
47:46and it is their experience
47:48that is the subject
47:49of this series.
48:12© BF-WATCH TV 2021